The Friday Five | No. 3

Five Newsy Nuggets in Five Minutes, Issued Every Friday

Aug 23, 2024

Welcome to The Friday Five, a weekly digest of 5 things that caught my attention in the past week. Welcome to Issue No. 3!

01 Industry News

Procreate Sticks it to the Artificial Man

This week, Procreate took a stance against generative AI by declaring total, eternal abstinence from it in its digital art tools. In a brief yet bold announcement on X, CEO James Cuda, assured its users: “We’re never going there." Creativity is made, not generated.” linking to their formal statement on their website.

“I really f—ing hate generative AI.”, Cuda said in the video. “I don’t like what’s happening in the industry, and I don’t like what it’s doing to artists. We’re not going to be introducing any generative AI into our products”.

On a personal note, I’m curious about the inclusion of generative wherever AI is mentioned. I think it’s safe to say that AI itself is here to stay, and that Procreate will have a hard time not using or including AI in some way (at least the “non-generative type”) in the near or distant future.

02 Worth a Follow

What’s with the No Website, Ms. Matoso?

I am such a sucker for confident simplicity. Madelena Matoso is a Portuguese illustrator who delivers the goods. She has numerous titles published, while she herself also happens to be a co-founder of Planeta Tangerina. While she does have a restrained Instagram presence, she is otherwise quite elusive as an individual on the Internet, which I find both inspiring and infuriating—I really wish I could learn more about the artist and her work!

03 Something I learned

Instagram Advice for Struggling Creatives

Are you a creative struggling in your relationship with Instagram? British stationer and flat-lay enthusiast Present & Correct offers this helpful advice:*

Embrace Newsletters, a mix of your work & things you enjoy. Make it feel like an inspiring service.
Run a blog and link to it daily from socials.
Have a monthly giveaway. It brings comments, will perform well, and serves as a reminder that you are there. More fun than a paid ad!
Recycle! Not everyone saw it the first time around. Always creating new content is not sustainable.

My takeaways: I mostly relate to the first two points. First, whatever content you share, it should add value to your audience. “Make it feel like an inspiring service” should be everyone’s social media mandate. Second, running a blog (or other daily sharing practice) gives you a consistent well of posting material when perhaps you don’t have new work to share.

*Content adapted from their recent post on Threads.

04 Technical Tip

Vectorizing Your Textures

Many of us work in raster-based programs like Procreate or Photoshop and use a lot of textures in our illustrations. Sometimes, the job requires vector files. The question is, can you vectorize textured art? The answer is yes, but only if your texture can hold up in a purely black and white (with no in-between values) representation. Strictly speaking, vector shapes can only be one colour and one opacity, without any variation. In the images below, I show how a print grain translates to vector reasonably well, while the washy texture does not.

Tip: If you know you’ll need to vectorize your art in the end, plan ahead by using only textures that can be survive the conversion to pure black and white. Anything else, like washy watercolour bits and gradients, will get lost in translation.

Results of vectorizing a Print grain (Fig. 1) vs. a Washy texture (Fig. 2).

05 Caught My Eye

A Flickr From the Past

In my recent inspiration hunts, I noticed a handful of image sources linking back to Flickr. That reminded me that almost 20 years ago, I first started posting my own photos and drawings online there myself. It also used to be where I discovered new illustrators, including Matte Stephens, whose work I am featuring here and who is surprisingly still going strong on the ancient platform.

Also, is that Professor McGonagall?